Thursday, April 05, 2007

As the number of Arabic-speaking Jews in Israel dwindles, interest in the language among the younger generation has waned to the point that some university Arabic departments are contemplating closing down. Scott Wilson in TheWashingtonPost has the story (via Tom Gross):

"Rosh Haayin, a town of 30,000 on Israel's coastal plain, highlights the demographic challenge facing military recruiters as the flow of Jews from Arabic-speaking countries dries up and the first new immigrant generation dies off.

"Jews from Yemen, raised speaking Arabic, once dominated Rosh Haayin. But they now account for roughly 10 percent of the population, composed mostly of middle-class Jews with European and Russian backgrounds who have little interest in Arabic. "There are very few native Arabic speakers left in the Jewish population," said Carmit Bar-On, who teaches the language at the high school here. "There is a problem teaching Arabic because there is a problem between Arabs and Jews."

"After military service, fewer and fewer Israelis are studying the language in university, threatening the future of some Arabic departments.

"At 73, (Sasson) Somekh, the retired professor, is the dean of Arabic studies in Israel. He arrived a native Arabic speaker from Baghdad in 1951 after graduating from high school there. His Arabic classes swelled following the 1973 Middle East war, then dipped when the first Palestinian uprising began in 1987, he said. Since the Oslo accords, enrollment has fallen more than 30 percent, even though, he said, "the threat to Israel is higher than ever."

"Reflecting the mood in Israel, he lamented, "A friend of mine tells me we are now a high-tech economy that the Arabs have nothing to do with, so now we can turn our eyes to the West."

"Three years ago, after Somekh had stopped teaching full time, the university president told him that he was considering closing the department. "I told him the whole world will say the largest university in Israel just closed its Arabic department," Somekh said. "That scared him. But there is still this feeling of needing to get away from them as far as possible. This is the attitude shown toward Arabs and toward Arabic."

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)